Oct 20, 2022 13:00:00

It turns out that YouTube recommends conservative videos regardless of personal thought

YouTube has introduced an algorithm that automatically selects and recommends movies based on the user's viewing history and themes of interest. According to this algorithm, it is said that the recommended movie is likely to cause an

echo chamber phenomenon that tends to be biased toward specific opinions and ideas, and a new research result has been announced that ``there is a strong tendency to recommend movies with conservative content.'' It has been.

Echo Chambers, Rabbit Holes, and Algorithmic Bias: How YouTube Recommends Content to Real Users - NYU's Center for Social Media and Politics
https://csmapnyu.org/research/echo-chambers-rabbit-holes-and-algorithmic-bias-how-youtube-recommends-content-to-real-users

YouTube more likely to recommend conservative vidoes to all • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/18/youtube_algorithm_conservative_content/

A research team at the New York University Center for Social Media Political Science (CSMP), which announced the results of the study, targeted 1063 adult Americans recruited by Facebook advertisements. A browser extension that records the browsing history of Google-related websites. After installing , we investigated the effect of YouTube's recommendation algorithm.

Participants choose one of 25 movies that mix political and non-political content, and from the selected movie, one of the first five movies recommended by YouTube I chose to watch it. The research team said that this recommended movie tour was repeated 20 times from October to December 2020. A pre-installed extension recorded which movies were recommended on YouTube and which movies were watched.

The research team measured the influence of the echo chamber phenomenon and the bias latent in the system from the record of the extended function, and scored whether the ideology of the recommended video was conservative or liberal. At the same time, we are also investigating the political ideology of the participants.

As a result of the investigation, the research team reports that YouTube's recommendation algorithm is slightly biased towards conservative content. By following the recommended movies, it seems that there were few cases where a movie with highly biased and radical content was reached, but the political thought of the participants was not related to the bias toward conservative content.

The research team said, ``We have found that YouTube's recommendation algorithm does not lead the majority of users into the ``rabbit hole'' of extremists. We found evidence of a phenomenon like this that pushes users into narrower ideologies.'

The research team said, ``The reason why following the recommendation algorithm leads to slightly conservative content is not well understood.Although our data can show the role played by the recommendation algorithm, its black box You can't look inside, 'he said, saying that it is not possible to correctly determine whether the 'mild ideological echo chamber phenomenon' is the result of the strong action of the recommendation algorithm.

The research team points out that a similar phenomenon can be seen on Twitter, and that conservative content tends to be more recommended than liberal content. The researchers speculate that conservative content may be more controversial and, as a result, lead to more engagement.